In 2009, the great blogger and cultural critic Mark Fisher picked up on the concept of “capitalist realism,” describing a state of mind where the triumph of this economic organization of life was so complete that it was impossible to imagine an alternative to it. But Fisher, who died in 2017, surely didn’t consider that two capitalisms would compete for headspace.
In one story, the Citrini Research “ghost GDP” thesis, AI is essentially a substitute for labor: codifiable, routine, formalizable work gets automated or compressed, hiring for it dries up, and the firms that move fastest win. In the other, something like Alex Imas’ “relational work” thesis, AI is a complement to labor, raising the value of tacit, contextual, hard-to-codify human judgment, and the firms that treat it as a replacement rather than a force multiplier for people, are quietly mispricing their own workforce.
